Reasons: Part 2

Beverly twitched her foot a few times, and stared at her hem. She resisted the urge to look around at the other women in the lobby. But she could hear one crying; she could smell the one guy here who wore cologne. Beverly thought, at least there was one who was willing to man up, to pay for what he'd done; at least in the monetary sense. He might be a shit, but at least he was standing up and facing the after-care, the... 'clean up' as it were.

She had other reasons for not having children; the world was a shit place, too many people in it, and many of them criminals. But one reason kept her coming back, back to the box, to turn over the little glass globe, the crystal thought in her head. If thoughts were crystal balls, she thought, this one would be mud-colored, because it was definitely a bad one. It was a big bad theory that she kept in another locked box, inside the other. It was a reason she'd never spoken aloud, not in the many arguments she'd had with the quasi-religious relatives, or the dwindling number of friends.

There was a reason, a superficial one that was obvious, that... hid the real one beneath, --it was like a cloth cover, and she doubted very much that it was the type of cloth that could be seen through, by anyone really. Who would honestly, try to? And that was the thing; who really, short of a daring psychiatrist or two, wanted to think about these things, these, shining, dirty bad theories that she kept tightly squirreled away? And yet, she was sure that more than one woman had arrived at this conclusion, and worse, these women had probably had daughters of their own.

The cloth cover, the obvious and sometimes entirely false reason was this: Men left. The nuclear family was the best setting to raise healthy normal children, but the men of this generation left, they weren't good for partnering with, and certainly bad prospects for breeding with the intent of a family unit in the future. Oh sure, they bred; they bred non-stop, creating a new generation of manic depressive teenagers who might as well have 'DADDY ISSUES' stamped in big blocky red letters on their foreheads. For all she knew, some of them probably did. The times were a marvel; how once hidden defaults and disorders became trendy accessories, to be taken into the schools for show and tell. You show me your emotional disorder, I'll show you mine... later on we'll cut ourselves and listen to techno or the sound of some androgynous guy wailing about -his- problems. That sort of self-absorbed shit.

She has been there, it was just a phase, sure, and one she found herself sinking into less and less as she left her own adolescence. Beverly imagined her adolescence, and often thought of a voluptuous girl, crying in the dusty, dirty Midwestern small town somewhere in a gully, where she'd fallen. A dirty girl-child who was developing too quickly, knew too much, and via natural intuition, became something new. Something bad, that which Beverly happened to like very much. But her adolescent self was always crying, because despite Beverly's moments of triumph, she was ...lonely, as this other species. This new breed; this flaw of evolution. Being the only one of her kind, like an alien, Beverly was set apart and immediately outcast by everyone in infinitesimal ways... she was even injured, and often, by kindness. Kindness can be a killer, for some.


© 2012 Ashley Harness


(And if you don't think I'll sue you, you're wrong.)